David AI Raises $5M to Bring High-Quality Audio AI into the Mainstream

For decades, audio has been a cornerstone of human communication, enabling connection, understanding, and collaboration across the globe. But when it comes to interactions with artificial intelligence, audio has remained surprisingly underdeveloped. While text-based models like ChatGPT have demonstrated the transformative potential of AI, audio remains constrained by a lack of high-quality, diverse, and scalable data—a challenge David AI set out to solve just six months ago.

Founded by Tomer C. and Ben Wiley, David AI emerged with a mission to make audio as central to human-to-AI interaction as it is to human-to-human communication. Their vision? To provide model developers with access to the kind of high-quality, expansive audio datasets that could finally bring audio AI into the mainstream. Today, that vision takes a significant step forward as the company announces a $5 million seed round, led by First Round Capital, with participation from BoxGroup, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Liquid 2, and a distinguished group of angel investors.

Despite the rapid progress in AI over recent years, audio AI models have struggled to keep pace. Unlike text, where datasets like Common Crawl have democratized access to massive training corpora, audio data is fragmented, outdated, and woefully limited in scale.

“High-quality audio data is fragmented—there’s no Common Crawl for audio,” explains the David AI team. “It’s scarce in the right formats, and the most-cited multi-channel speech datasets in research are often hundreds of hours in duration, but they’re dated. Generating new audio data is even harder because you have to ensure content accuracy while also accounting for complex variables like acoustic properties, microphones, recording environments, languages, and localizations.”

This scarcity isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a bottleneck for innovation. To achieve their potential, audio models need data that is richer, more diverse, and better tailored to the nuances of human communication. These requirements are what inspired David AI to step into the gap, building the first audio-native AI data platform designed for scale.

Building the Infrastructure for Audio AI

David AI isn’t just gathering data—it’s rethinking how data is collected, processed, and delivered. The company’s approach combines novel software, hardware, and operational systems to exponentially expand the breadth of available audio data without compromising on quality.

“Since founding David AI, we’ve collected the largest corpus of channel-separated speech data on the market,” the team shared. “The dataset is 10x the next largest one and spans ~15 languages, with rich accent and dialect metadata. Our data has already been used to train several of the best speech models on the market.”

What sets David AI apart is its commitment to preserving the sound quality nuances that can make or break a model. From studio-grade recording environments to rigorous quality assurance protocols, every aspect of their infrastructure is purpose-built for audio. This ensures that their datasets not only meet today’s needs but are capable of powering the more advanced models of tomorrow.

Aiming for Audio AI’s ‘ChatGPT Moment’

“In 2025, audio AI will have its ‘ChatGPT moment,’” predicts the team. “Our mission is to accelerate this by helping our customers bring better audio models to market, faster.”

Their confidence isn’t without merit. The company’s datasets have already contributed to significant advancements in speech recognition, natural language processing, and other audio-based applications. By expanding access to scalable, high-quality audio data, David AI is enabling researchers and developers to push the boundaries of what audio AI can achieve.

The $5M seed funding marks a major milestone for the young company. Led by First Round Capital, the round also includes investments from BoxGroup, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Liquid 2, and an impressive roster of angel investors. This backing not only validates David AI’s approach but also provides the resources needed to continue building their ambitious vision.

As audio AI continues to evolve, the role of companies like David AI will be crucial. By tackling the data scarcity problem head-on, they’re laying the groundwork for a new era of audio-powered interactions, where AI can understand, interpret, and respond to human communication with the same naturalness and fluency as a conversation between friends.

In just six months, David AI has gone from an idea to a leader in the audio AI space. With their innovative platform, a growing dataset, and a team committed to pushing boundaries, the future of audio AI looks.